The College Fix

We should not ‘normalize’ this behavior under any circumstances

In what has become an all-too-frequent occurrence, a recent protest on a college campus turned violent: students at Georgia Tech, who turned out to mourn the police shooting of a fellow student and criticize the police for doing it, ended up clashing with police, setting fire to a police car and scuffling with officers in the street. Three people were arrested and two cops were injured.

The shooting in question appears to have been one of “suicide-by-cop;” the young man who was shot left behind suicide notes, phoned in the police call that led to his death, and urged officers to shoot him while he came at them with a knife. In this light, the violent protests seem all the more misplaced and counterproductive. But they would have been so anyway, as all useless violent demonstrations invariably are.

But we have dug ourselves into something of a pit in this regard. As Megan McCardle points out this week, our political culture has “normalized the Left’s violence.” We seem to have taken it as a matter of course that, upon becoming upset, a percentage of leftists will inevitably resort to violent behavior, up to and including assault, especially on college campuses where progressive ideology is effectively ubiquitous. At Berkeley this assumption is so ingrained that the school recently spent more than half a million dollars on security when conservative speaker Ben Shapiro came to speak. $600,000 just so a relatively mainstream political commentator could come to a public university: is something wrong with this picture?

There is something deeply broken about a political environment that seems to have become more or less inured to violence as a workaday sort of occurrence. In cases like the shooting at Georgia Tech, where the circumstances are complex and troubling, a violent response is outrageously unwarranted. But even when political situations merit more anger, it is frankly absurd to imagine that setting fire to a police car, or getting into scuffles with police, is going to change anything at all, much less that it is appropriate. Starting street brawls with law enforcement is not an effective tactic for political change. And learning to tolerate such behavior is not a good look for any of us.

MORE: Students for Justice in Palestine defends violence against pro-Israel groups, calls them ‘fascists’

IMAGE: Shutterstock

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter